Delphi complete works of.., p.757
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 757
Thus not only college education but any general school system had to wait.
Yet while learning withered at the root finance grew apace. But the discussion of the epoch marked by the formation of the Bank of Montreal in 1817 is best deferred to the more spacious days that followed the union of the Canadas.
Montreal had no sooner started on its civic life than storms began to gather over it. What had been twenty years before little more than casual murmurs of discontent, the recollections of a lost cause, the memories that refused to die, now begin to ferment into a fierce quarrel — the “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state” — of which Lord Durham was to speak.
In Upper Canada the agitation that led to the Rebellion of 1837 was mere restive protest against the unfair privileges of a petty aristocracy and of a favored church. There was not enough to fight for, and in the sequel no one fought. In Lower Canada this grievance was there also but was lost in the deeper hostility of race against race. As agitation grew it centered mainly around Montreal rather than Quebec, for in and around Montreal was where the French and English were most mixed. Quebec was and remained quiet. The rebel agitators among the French were not really agitating for responsible government or even better government but for some method of voting the English off their backs. Louis Joseph Papineau and his associates presently (1834) put their grievances into the famous “ninety-two resolutions.” They could have said it all in one.
What the English agitators of Lower Canada wanted was some way of voting monarchy off their backs. The basis of this was the call of the republic, so powerful in the springtime of democracy, and not weakened in Canada by contemplating across the water the morality of George IV or the intelligence of his honest brother. The racial call claimed Louis Joseph Papineau; republican freedom claimed such a man as Wolfred Nelson, and both called forth such generous youths as George Étienne Cartier, later a conservative Father of Confederation, and Dr. Chenier, whose statue stands in Montreal today, eager even in dead stone. With others, as with Dr. O’Callaghan, the sorrows of Ireland were added to the cup.
The agitation in the country was kindled in the legislature at Quebec, its flames fanned by the speeches of Louis Joseph Papineau. But the real seat of the trouble was in Montreal and in the district around Montreal Island and Isle Jésus and in the settlements on the Richelieu. Papineau lived in Montreal, his house being situated on St. Paul Street. He sat as one of the two members for the West Ward.
The year 1832 saw the first outbreak of violence. A by-election in the West Ward, involving after the old-time fashion several days of voting at the open poll, led to the gathering of a mob around the closing poll. In the scene of tumult which ensued the garrison soldiers (Colonel McIntosh with the Fifteenth Regiment) were called out. The Riot Act was read. The crowd refused to go. The soldiers advanced toward the mob in the Place d’Armes against a hail of stones which injured many, including the colonel. After ineffectual warnings McIntosh ordered a volley from the front platoon. Three of the crowd fell dead, two wounded. The rest vanished. Artillery was set to command the streets. McIntosh was arrested on a coroner’s warrant but set free afterward. The French paper, La Minerve, shouted massacre. Five thousand people, among them Papineau, speaker of the House, walked in the funeral of the men killed.
It seems strange to think that it was just after this scene of disorder that there came to Montreal its first and most terrible visitation of the cholera, brought by the immigrant ships. In the middle of June of that year (1832) the deaths ran to 100 a day. In all there were some 3384 cases and 947 deaths in June.
After this first outbreak, meetings, organization, and agitation continued; the Papineau majority blocked all official business in the Assembly. The “ninety-two resolutions” were passed by the House in 1834. The British party formed Constitutional Associations in the same year. In Montreal many French Canadians adhered to the government side. But in the general election of 1835 the vote showed in Montreal 13,714 demanding reform against 6254 opposed. Circulars went from Montreal to the country, and to England, sent from both sides. Lord Gosford was sent out as Governor on August 23, 1835, specially commissioned to compose the quarrel. Sir John Colborne, ending his term as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada in 1836, was made Chief of the Forces in Canada. After a brief journey to England he took command at Montreal.
Even among these events the broken lights of history flicker between shadow and sunshine. Here in these mid-dangers we may forget a moment Louis Joseph Papineau and turn to a pretty midsummer scene, so often depicted and so full of sunlight (July 1836), the opening of the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railway Company, the first railway in Canada. The railway is to connect Montreal to New York by covering fifteen miles from La Prairie to St. Johns. The rest is just a matter of steamers, and a short rail journey in the state of New York. There is the scene under the trees — the train on its toy track of wood with strips of iron, its engine thirteen feet long, its two quaint cars like wooden playhouses, and all about it a sylvan scene of bright uniforms, gay crinolines, gentlemen in top hats, Lord Gosford, the Governor General, and off at fifteen miles an hour to St. Johns, and on arrival such a banquet and junketing, champagne and speeches, that we can for the moment quite forget Louis Joseph Papineau — or we could, except that Papineau was there, one of the top hats.
Thus began the railway, innocent as a summer day, gentle as a kitten, later an octopus, and then a “problem” — the machine age’s first-born son, gone wrong.
At a meeting at St. Ours (above Sorel) Dr. Wolfred Nelson called for armed rebellion. “Sons of Liberty” were organized in Montreal. Papineau moved among the meetings. “The game which Mr. Papineau is playing cannot be mistaken,” said Sir John Colborne, a veteran of Waterloo, smelling powder and ready to begin. Monsieur Latigue issued a mandament against revolt. A fierce riot took place in Montreal (November 6, 1837) between the Sons of Liberty and the Constitutional crowd, fighting up and above St. James Street and St. Lawrence Main. Thomas Storrow Brown was one of the injured. This was the Brown from whose peaceful memories of old age we have just quoted. He was one of the fierce young men of 1837, bitter against injustice. “A sense of justice,” he wrote in his later memoirs, “that generous inheritance from a British ancestry, urged me on.” Meetings and processions were forbidden. Warrants were out for Papineau, Dr. O’Callaghan, and T. S. Brown. Papineau left Montreal. Detachments of the military sent out to make arrests met resistance at St. Denis on the Richelieu. Thirteen rebels were killed and six soldiers. One of the British officers, Lieutenant Weir, was captured by rebels and hacked and shot to death. There came another fight next day (November 24, 1837) at St. Charles against troops better armed. Many rebels were killed, certainly nearly fifty, rumor said a hundred and fifty. Colborne led a column to St. Eustache. The rebels were trapped in the village church, in a scene of hideous slaughter. Dr. Chenier was shot attempting to escape by a window. Among those present was Captain Marryat, the famous veteran of the Great War at sea who lived it over again in his sea stories. He was on an American tour and joined Colborne. He wrote:
I have been with Sir John Colborne, the Commander in Chief, and have just now returned from an expedition of five days against St. Eustache and Grand Brulé, which has ended in the total discomfiture of the rebels, and I may add, the putting down of the insurrection in both provinces. I little thought when I wrote last that I should have had the bullets whizzing about my ears again so soon. It has been a sad scene of sacrilege, murder, burning, and destroying. All the fights have been in the churches, and they are now burnt to the ground and strewed with the wasted bodies of the insurgents. War is bad enough, but civil war is dreadful. Thank God it is all over. The winter has set in; we have been fighting in deep snow, and crossing rivers with ice thick enough to bear the artillery; we have been always in extremes — at one time our ears and noses frost bitten by the extreme cold, at others amidst the flames of hundreds of houses.
Resistance ended for the time. Wolfred Nelson was captured. Papineau, Dr. O’Callaghan, and “General” Brown escaped. In Montreal there were many arrests including thirty or forty men of later prominence, two of them later on joint prime ministers, Louis H. Lafontaine (the associate of Robert Baldwin) and George Étienne Cartier (the associate of Sir John A. Macdonald).
Durham was all for leniency. He was an autocratic liberal, liberal enough to pardon even rebellion, autocratic enough to exceed his power in doing so. He made a general amnesty, sentenced to death the man he couldn’t catch, and banished those already caught. This banished Dr. Wolfred Nelson into freedom. Durham was recalled. Rebellion broke out again in the autumn of 1838, fed by incursions from Vermont — Colborne stamped it fiercely down. At one place (Odelltown, November 9, 1838) fifty rebels were killed. Then came the trials held at Montreal. Twelve patriots were sentenced to death and hanged in successive groups (December 21, 1838, two; January 18, 1839, five; February 15, 1839, five). The last five — by a queer fashion of those rude times when highwaymen made speeches on the gallows — were given the privilege, or, shall we say, the “send-off” of a farewell supper, with aftersupper speeches. The place of execution was an open square in what is the east end of the city over which now passes the structure of the great Jacques Cartier Bridge. It has been christened the Patriot’s Square (Place des Patriotes). The site of the scaffold is marked by a monument — a huge upright slab of stone which carries the twelve names of the men executed, six on one side, six on the other.
A tall stone column in the Côte des Neiges Cemetery also commemorates the “Patriotes.” The historian Kingsford gives a full personal record of each. Six of them, he says, were sentenced not only for rebellion, but deservedly for murder. Even so, there are tears left for the others. Especial sorrow was felt for the young Chevalier de Lorimier who died last, a letter of farewell to his wife and children against his breast.
We may repeat again the words of Fox that rebels often save their country.
The more fortunate rebels had fled, or been banished, into safety. Later on an “Act of Forgetfulness” of 1843, called by the lawyers a “nolle sequi” — a “don’t-follow-it-up” — allowed them to come back. Dr. Wolfred Nelson came back to practice his profession in Montreal. He was elected to the Assembly, was twice Mayor of Montreal, a Harbour Commissioner, and a father of the city. With him came T. S. Brown, no longer a general but returning to his hardware business like Cincinnatus to the plow. The return of Papineau, like that of William Lyon Mackenzie, was less fortunate. They found themselves forgiven and forgotten — out of date as time moved on to other issues. Dr. O’Callaghan stayed in New York. Medieval warriors used to enter the cloister; O’Callaghan took to history, the “Documentary History” of New York.
Such was the Rebellion of 1837-39, a sad chronicle, one stage in our slow method of groping toward freedom. After it, when the two Canadas were reunited by the Act of Union of 1840, there was done, on Durham’s suggestion, what could have been done before. Canada received responsible government with the new Act, under which a colony could manage its own affairs. The system went round the world and preserved the British Empire. But in Canada it was connected with rejoining French and British Canada, and that was a different matter.
FOOTNOTES:
J. R. Green, The British People, 1874.
J. B. McMaster, History of the United States.
Letter of the Anglican Bishop of Quebec, October 17, 1799.
CHAPTER IX. Montreal
Capital of United Canada
1841-1849-1867
Montreal Burns Out Its Parliament. Hard Times. Movement for Annexation. Public Works and Civic Celebrations. The Railways. The Victoria Bridge. Visit of the Prince of Wales. The American Civil War. Confederation.
In the commercial sense Montreal has been the capital of Canada from the later period of the old French Regime until today. Nor is it likely to lose this metropolitan pre-eminence although it is quite possible that Vancouver may presently surpass it in population. But in the political sense it was the capital of Canada, of the United Province of Canada, for only the brief years from 1843-49. It disgraced and disqualified itself by burning down its own capital buildings in a riot and doing its best to stone to death its Governor General, Lord Elgin. The event had a peculiar historical bearing: it served as a corroboration of the popular, democratic opinion that had originated with the Reign of Terror in Paris, that the government (the political capital) should not be exposed to the dangers of overthrow by a city mob. Hence the idea of a dream capital, all embowered in leaves, small and remote with no one near but shepherds, a notoriously angelic class. The idea wrote itself over the map of the United States; children and foreigners learn with surprise that the state capitals of the United States hardly ever seem where they ought to be; New York is not the capital of New York State, nor Chicago of Illinois, nor are San Francisco and New Orleans capitals, nor even, unkindest of all, Philadelphia, the city in which was signed the Declaration of 1776 that made it, in a sense, the capital of the world. At the same time the list of state capitals includes such names as Pierre, Boise, Cheyenne, and Salem. Some people, ignorant people, would hardly know where they belong. Now at the time when Montreal was burned this theory and practice were in mid-career, but still on trial. The sin of Montreal gave it new life. The four last capitals named above were made so later than 1849.
It is not necessary to explain in this book the details of the changes in Canada which thus made Montreal its capital. After the Rebellion of 1837-38 Lord Durham’s Report recommended the union of Lower and Upper Canada into one province with a single capital city. He recommended the adoption of cabinet government, ministers responsible to the elected majority in Parliament. This was a great step, the turning point in the unity and pre-eminence of the British Empire. For this Durham’s memory is part of our history. But his other recommendation was not so happy. This new freedom to vote as a majority was also to be used to outvote the French from control of the government. It was as simple as a conjurer’s trick, taking a government rabbit out of a French hat. It was so simple that Durham’s unhappy phrase, “their vain hopes of nationality,” gave it all away. The French Canadians never forgave, have never forgiven, Lord Durham.
In the outcome Durham’s plan failed. It was not possible, never has been, to get a large enough united majority of English to outvote the French. The converse happened. The only findable majority was one made up of a bloc of French and a bloc of English, and carrying on a dual government, with double prime ministers like twin stars, and legislation in one section, Canada East turned inside out to fit Canada West. Hence the peculiar double prime ministerships of Baldwin-Lafontaine (1842-49) and the later transient and unstable combinations that carried on in the United Province (1849-64) till they collapsed into a pile of wreckage, out of which was made the wider Confederation of 1867.
All of this is vital historical matter but its full depiction lies on a wider canvas. We are concerned here with the burning of the Parliament Building in Montreal. The new government of the Union was proclaimed at Montreal on February 10, 1841, by the first Governor General of the United Province, formerly Mr. Poullett Thompson but now raised to the peerage as Baron Sydenham of York and Toronto. The name of Montreal was already in the peerage, and still is, in the title of Baron Amherst of Montreal, conferred on General Amherst, the conqueror of Montreal, in 1788. His home in Kent was called Montreal. “On this day (of the proclamation) in Montreal,” writes the historian Kingsford, “in the presence of all the dignitaries of the church and of civil life, of the Commander of the forces, of officers commanding regiments, and all who could be collected of the principal citizens, the oath was taken and the two provinces were established as the Province of Canada.”
The first Parliament opened, as a temporary arrangement, at Kingston, Montreal sending its first two members there, Mr. Benjamin Holmes and the Hon. George Moffatt, on June 14, 1841. But it was as plain as it was reasonable that Montreal must be made the capital, Quebec being too French and too far east, Toronto too British and too far west. The choice was not finally made till 1843, nor the actual move till a Parliament House was provided in 1844. But immediately after the union the Governor and executive were much in Montreal, the Château de Ramezay was Government House, and a sort of sunshine of official importance broke out over the city, chasing away the retreating clouds of rebellion and repression.
It was precisely in this burst of sunshine that occurred the famous visit of Charles Dickens, himself in a burst of recovered sunshine in having escaped from the liberty of the United States back to the glory of allegiance.
All the world knows the story of his ill-starred visit to the United States in 1842, in the first flush of his phenomenal literary success. The roaring national welcome that he received ended in something not far from expulsion, on his part a glad escape — Dickens, like Mrs. Traill, had no eye to see. In what was the great epic of a nation on the march, of democracy enthroned by civilization claiming the Mississippi Valley, he saw nothing but chattel slavery, chewing tobacco, swamps, ague, and vulgarity. He had no eye for the Mississippi; he thought it mud. He could hear no music in the spring love song of the frogs in its marshes. Over and above all which, he was furious at what he thought the open theft of his books for lack of copyright. He came from the “Far West” into Upper Canada in a passion of loyalty, converted overnight from a young radical to an old Tory.
